Ask HN: why Google doesn't see HN as a link farm?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7078475

by timrivera • 13 years ago

8 8 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Honest question. We know Google [1] (Bing and other s.e.) is fighting an endless war against link farms. AFAIK HN doesn't use rel="nofollow" [2] (EDIT: not entirely true, see comments below) so its link juice may flow to any website that is submitted. However, HN and its linked sites don't seem to be negatively affected nor penalized. What makes HN different from what Google consider a link farm?

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569

mooism2• 13 years ago

Afaik, HN uses rel=nofollow on all links below a certain score.

timrivera2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know that.

gus_massa• 13 years ago

I looked in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and apparently the nofollow disappears when the story gets 6 point. The number may change without prior notice. Perhaps they are using a more complicated secret criterion.

lkrubner• 13 years ago

Other comments already pointed out the use of "nofollow". But it is also worth a mention that old, well established sites of high rank link to Hacker News. Most link farms do not have incoming links from highly ranked sites, so the existence of such links is another clue that Google uses to distinguish a discussion forum like Hacker News from a link farm.

timrivera2• 13 years ago

Most link farms do not have incoming links from highly ranked sites

That's a good point I didn't consider.

memracom• 13 years ago

Uhm, Google doesn't do PageRank anymore. Now their algorithms are driven by people's choices. They know which links people click when they do a search, and they also have "focus groups" who provide ratings of how useful sites are. They use that info to derive algorithms, but at the root, there are people constantly providing feedback to Google, and link farms have no way to escape that.

And of course, lots of people provide favourable feedback for HN so it is not treated like a link farm.

eloff• 13 years ago

Source? AFAIK they use over a hundred metrics including PageRank and what you're talking about.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

In recent days, Google doesn't even SEE HN. I think it's because HN is blocking Google for being too aggressive in crawling.

Ask HN: why Google doesn't see HN as a link farm?

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